MoniFun strives to enhance European forest monitoring

The new EU funded project MoniFun (2024-2027) aims to establish the blueprint for a comprehensive European Forest Multifunctionality Monitoring System (EFMMS). The EFMMS deals with the challenges posed by climate change and environmental stressors on Europe's forests. 

“The need for such an initiative has arisen due to lack of harmonized European-level information required by policymakers and other stakeholders regarding the multifaceted aspects of forests. These aspects encompass properties related to forest resources, and the connection of forests with society, climate and biodiversity to support progress towards climate action and reversing biodiversity loss,” says Project Coordinator Lauri Mehtätalo from Natural Resource Institute Finland. 

The project will use a multi-actor approach to ensure the wide applicability of the monitoring system, addressing the information needs of various institutions and stakeholders. MoniFun aims at mapping the essential information needs and responding to these using data with sufficient quality and the most suitable data sources, such as remote sensing, national forest inventories and other existing data sources. Key innovations in MoniFun are tools that can efficiently combine these data sources using semi-automatic methods without a need to risk the confidentiality of the original data sets. To address methodological challenges, MoniFun will develop harmonized solutions, maximizing the system's applicability.

EFI leads a task in WP2 in which expert indicator definitions and methods for monitoring forest multifunctionality will be developed. “This task focuses on wood material flows and the related climate and socioeconomic impacts. More specific, we will develop methodological guidance for improving the tracking of wood flows and—as a result—the understanding and monitoring of the effects of wood use via connecting wood flows with end-use sectoral data. This will help us better assess the sustainability of wood products and their carbon storage potentials, as well as the effects on society, “ says EFI Researcher Cleo Orfanidou.

In addition, EFI will contribute on the indicator definition on socioeconomic demands for ecosystem services. Furthermore, EFI will help in identifying user and policy needs for monitoring forest multifunctionality (WP1), and EFI will also launch and manage grants to third parties to test and validate solution developed in MoniFun.

MoniFun - Co-creating a blueprint of a harmonised European Forest Multifunctionality Monitoring System has 13 project partners from 11 European countries and is funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under project no. 101134991. 

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